Studio Zalktis
I'm Zintars Beldavs — I build interactive web experiences, films, and animations that connect ideas from far-apart fields into a single thread. This is a living portfolio of recent work.
The story worlds I'm building now, and the two most recent finished ones.
Work made with other artists — their art, this studio's machinery.
Fieldwork, folklore, music and history — four ways of returning to Latvia.
Hypertext edition · Original research
My own thesis, published whole for the first time: ten chapters on public participation in environmental policy, built from a reef in Fiji, a river mouth in Belize and a survey of 260 people in Latvia. The figures were recovered from inside the original 2005 document, the charts redrawn from the 1994 field data — and a second half returns to all three places thirty years on.
Hypertext edition · Folklore scholarship
My mother's doctoral work on apdziedāšanās, Latvian ritual insult song-warring, rebuilt as one continuous annotated hypertext — hover glossary, cross-references, and an interactive map of its concepts.
Playable instruments · Latviski & English
Four Latvian folk instruments — kokle, stabule, dūdas, vijole — playable in your browser, with a learn mode that teaches real folk songs note by note, every melody traced to verified notation and its original singer.
Cinematic journey · Latviski & English
Follow a river through Latvia's history: early communities and Viking connections, folklore and Dievturība, towns and castles, occupation, diaspora and return. An eight-to-nine-minute narrated journey combining animated landscapes, music and imagined historical scenes, with optional subtitles and sources to explore.
Things to open and poke at — a museum of my drawings, a maze to run, and a tool for deciding whether to go skiing. All in the browser, right now.
Virtual gallery · 512 drawings
A first-person museum of 512 of my digital drawings, curated into themed halls beneath skies photographed on my travels — with Latvian ornament woven throughout. Walk it like a game; every work has its own wall label. The soundtrack is Voiceks Voiska — the first Latvian ska band, which I played in while on a Fulbright in Latvia — spinning a different song from our album «Konvojs» in every hall.
Browser game · Three cameras
The 1980 maze chase rebuilt in 3D — and you are inside the yellow one's head, its jaws opening and closing around your view as you run. One keypress swaps between first person, a chase camera above the walls, and the flat overhead board of the original. It is dressed in Latvian folklore: a woven belt of Auseklis and Jumis signs runs the walls, the dots are milk set out for the grass snake that guards the house, and the four hunters are Vilkacis, Ragana, Lietuvēns and Velns — keeping, underneath, the exact century-old chase logic of the arcade original.
Ski conditions · 52 areas · live data
I ski, and I got tired of opening four tabs to answer one question: is tomorrow worth the drive. A snow report, a forecast, an avalanche bulletin and a road map — none of which reference each other. So this joins them. For 52 ski areas across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah and British Columbia it shows the snow that actually fell, the snow that's coming, the avalanche danger for the zone the mountain sits in, and whether the pass between you and it is open — plus 128 live road cameras on a map. Built for myself; you're welcome to it, but check the real sources before you drive.
Browser game · 140+ real mountains
The mountains I ski, and the ones players asked for, rebuilt to ride in a browser — over 140 of them now, from Mount Hood, Mt. Bachelor and the rest of Oregon to Utah's Cottonwoods, Colorado, Jackson Hole, Whistler, New England and Quebec, and on to Zermatt, Chamonix, St Anton, Alpe d'Huez, Les 3 Vallées, the Dolomites, Niseko, New Zealand, Australia, Portillo and Gulmarg. The ground is real elevation data (USGS lidar, and national surveys abroad) with every run and lift that OpenStreetMap maps, and on most mountains the real forest too: trees measured from lidar, standing where they actually grow, along with real cliffs, creeks and snow lines. Race riders or your own ghost down any run, ride chairs that sway in the wind, take on the Streif against the course record, heli-ski the Monashees, ski through a storm, try Realistic mode's moguls and yard sales, or turn on "Ski Today" for the resort's actual weather. Load the GPX from your ski app and your skier replays your own day. I build it with AI coding help; the mountains, runs and lifts are real data, and the game says plainly which parts are real and which are invented. Lejup is Latvian for "downhill". On a computer, a phone or tablet held sideways, or — in beta — a VR headset.
Short pieces and experiments — a selection from 157 videos made over the last few years.
The zalktis — the grass snake — is an ancient Latvian symbol of wisdom, protection, and the thread that connects the worlds. I weave ideas from history, science, art, and myth to create new experiences that honor the old.
I work across interactive web, film, and animation. Some pieces are large and cinematic; some are quiet experiments. They share a belief that the best way to understand the future is to tell its story well.
Get in touch: [email protected]
